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Football and basketball teams with established fandoms and winning records subsidize the rest of the school, and I suppose it's only fair for women's sports to be part of that.
Men's curling is no more profitable than women's curling.
Sure, but it's never the curling team getting blinged out locker rooms that are posted next to run down parts of campus to try and make it sound like money is being misappropriated. I really don't have that much of an issue with the popular teams subsidizing other teams, It's the entitlement to it that I find distasteful. The fact that people genuinely seem indignant that very profitable departments have nice stuff and then have the gall to declare that the profitable departs don't deserve some of the profit they bring in. It goes right down to the fundamentals of the left world view that just rubs me the wrong way, it's always this sneering belief that people and groups can't possibly deserve to be more successful than others. That those on top must have cheated others out through some zero sum rat fucking because it's incomprehensible that other people can just be excellent and produce genuine value.
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Are you sure about that? I'll have to look up some actual numbers, but my intuition would be that just as men's basketball is more profitable than the entirely unprofitable cost center of women's basketball, so too would men's baseball lose less money than women's softball (though both are still unprofitable). Anecdotallly at my uni the dorms were really close to the baseball stadium and I always saw bigger crowds at men's baseball than women's softball.
Here's my local university's sports budgets to flip through. Football was up about $58 million, basketball about $10 million, men's hockey broke even (up $170K even!), and everything else is a fiscal drain. Somewhat amusingly, this school won both women's ice hockey and women's volleyball nationally, even set volleyball attendance records, and still lost millions on both sports. Maybe the reputational gains and fun that students have makes up for it, maybe not, but you've got to spend it somewhere due to Title IX, so I guess they decided to pour money into the women's sports that they might have success in. Things like golf, soccer, track, tennis, and swimming are money losers on both sides in fairly comparable amounts.
Just one school, but I bet it's a common pattern for schools with power conference football teams. Football pays for everything else and then some.
This is exactly the analysis that converted me from loathing college football to a begrudging support. I still don't enjoy the hype, but I can now see the good things football programs bring to the environment. I want people to be able to do fencing, curling, archery, golf, soccer, track, etc. I think those are excellent channels for character development. If football makes all of that possible, then I support football.
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Baseball is still pretty popular though, most sports probably attract no crowd at all, men or women.
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